I had always been intrigued by triathlon. I had known a few people that had done it and had been pretty successful at it. A lad I used to train and race with at the Lichfield Swimming Club had moved on to triathlons and had gone on to compete at a pretty high level. My reservation had always been the bike element. I was a pretty good swimmer and runner, and as I’ve already indicated, had done quite well at biathlons. I’d just never done any competitive cycling so felt this was going to prevent me from doing well.
After I stopped rowing I was once again looking for my next challenge. I needed something to train for, a goal. I decided on a spur of the moment one afternoon in late 2011 to take the plunge and enter the London Triathlon. I’d had a look at it online and as the event was so well subscribed you had to enter well in advance to secure a spot. Not really knowing the distances I plumped for the Olympic version as it was the longest one they did and seemed like a decent challenge. This consists of a 1500m swim, 40km bike and 10k run. How bad could that be? It was nine months away so it gave me enough time to get my head around doing it.
Once I’d entered the event I thought I better look around for a local club and found out that Charnwood Triathlon club did a weekly swim session on Monday evenings at my local swimming baths at the Friary, Lichfield. I thought this was the best place to start as I could get myself back in to swimming competitively whilst getting to know the sporting ropes from other triathletes in the club.
It was good to do some proper swimming training again. My first session involved a 20 minute swim. The idea was to see how many lengths you could cover during that time, which could then be used as a benchmark for the future. I did ok, swimming just short of a mile. Not bad for someone who had been away from it for a few years.
However, I needed to update my kit. I’d turned up in beach shorts. I hadn’t owned a pair of trunks, or ‘budgie smugglers’ as they are affectionately known, for years. All I knew was that tight speedo swimming trunks were not the done thing anymore. The designs had thankfully moved on to more shorts-style swimming trunks, so I went off and found a pair at my local sports shop. I also didn’t have any goggles. When I was swimming as a teenager I’d always had a specific set of Godfrey’s (you swimmers out there will know what I mean) that I bought from the swimming club gear sale. These had replaceable foam eye pads and a double strap, proper comfy as I recall. Thinking this was the place to start, I googled them only to find out that the manufacturer no longer made them. I was gutted. Like most people, I get attached to certain types of kit and goggles were all about comfort. They were also quite cool back in the day. That sounds really old doesn’t it? I am becoming my dad.
Wearing more appropriate gear for the next session, I got moved up in to the top lane. There were some seriously fast swimmers in there. I got to know them and others in the session after a few weeks and started to learn more about triathlon itself. It turned out the club was fairly informal, with weekly structured swimming sessions and a track evening at Burton-Upon-Trent. The rest was quite loose, with focus on the social side of things.
I soon got to know a group of lads that were more interested in competing and I learnt that a few were very strong triathletes. Some were Great Britain age group standard. Liking the sound of their approach I slowly got invited in to their discussions and online forums. It was nice to meet like-minded people, and on top of that they were all really nice and friendly. It shouldn’t be a surprise I guess, as most clubs I’ve been involved in are very welcoming but it’s nice to click with people on a similar level.
It’s an interesting thing in triathlon that you begin to get introduced to a new technical language. This is mainly around the bike element. Most really good triathletes I know are very strong cyclists as well as good runners. There is a saying that you can’t win a triathlon on the swim, but you can lose it. This really applies at the top end of the sport when seconds count. For novice triathletes like myself, you can lose an awful lot of time to a decent cyclist.
I began to realise that as well as having good overall fitness, you needed to have the right gear. My Giant OCR road bike suddenly seemed like a very distant cousin from the lightweight carbon frames I was starting to learn about. Realising I was woefully ill equipped from a cycling point of view I stayed away from the group rides for a long time. To be honest I thought I would be left behind within the first few minutes and was quite embarrassed about my lack of cycling ability. I know this is a bit daft, but a man has his pride. Particularly one who doesn’t like being rubbish at anything.
Most of my bike rides were therefore solo outings. I was ok with this, but clearly it means you don’t learn from others or progress as rapidly as you should. My thinking was that I would get myself in to some kind of shape before joining some of the guys from the club. For the running part I just continued to do local run loops from my home in Kings Bromley. No real structure to it, I just put my trainers on and ran out of the door. Apart from the swim then, I wasn’t really tailoring my training in any way to this multi-discipline sport. In fact I was just sticking to what I knew best and learning other stuff as I went along.